Sunday, May 27, 2012

In the last couple of weeks, every new Smartphone seems to come with cloud storage attached, e.g. the 25GB you get with HTC - as announced in Barcelona earlier this year.I think there are good reasons for the manufacturers to prefer cloud storage over SD slots/cards:

A SD increases the cost of the device - not by a lot, but still.

It imposes physical restrictions on the design, because the SD slot it obviously has to be accessible.

Preferable not hidden behind the battery, otherwise you will get bad reviews

The capacity of the SD card will for some weird reasons affect reviews, too. If you only include 8GB of SD storage, reviewers will tell their readers to get some other smartphone with 16GB... If you include a too large SD card it will drive up cost and price...

Also, if a customer decides to replace his SD card with a larger one, the phone manufacturer will not see any revenue from it, but SanDisk and others will.

However, going for cloud storage

will have no impact on the manufacturing cost

will not impose any design restrictions

and you can upsell your users to higher capacity and make mony from it.

Friday, May 25, 2012

The other day I heard about SwiftKey X keyboard for Android (I think it was on All About Android) and since I was not really too happy with my default HTC keyboard (on my HTC Desire Z) I though I'd give the free trial a try.

Well, it quite convinced me. The auto-completion and prediction is quite good, since it takes the data from my own history... (SMS, twitter, facebook, ...) So I found it to really suggest the phrases as I use them... Even in mixed English/German environment.

Sure I had a new set of typos to surprise people, I hope I caught most of them...Let's say I had my fair share of damn you autocorrect moments.

Anyway, I really got used to the new prediction within a week or so, and should be back to my normal rate of typos... or hopefully less.

Yesterday - when the trial ended - I bought the full version. $3.99 is really not a lot :) I'd have bought the full version earlier, if I had remembered that I was running on the trial version... I did not see any limitations there.

So if you are unhappy with your current Android keyboard... give SwiftKey X a try.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Today was the first time that having the Kindle app on my (HTC Android) mobile really came in handy.
I picked up my daughter from her English drama rehearsal, which ran 45min 1 hour late and I had nothing to do. No podcast to listen to, no gadgets with me except for my phone.
So I synced to my current reading position and continued to read my current book.
A bit cumbersome on 3.7" but better than nothing...

Sunday, May 13, 2012

So one thing that really annoys me is when the clock on my gadgets get totally out of sync.Like 1hr 5min on my Kindle 3 - ok, the 1hr most probably stems from DST and not from an inaccurate clock, but still.

I expect my connected devices to get their time from the network (or from the PC, depending on how they are connected).

Why can Whispersync synchronize books and my position within this book, but not get the time from some source on the net? Or the PC when I connect the kindle via USB?

This is annoying.

To fix the time you have to go to Home > Settings > page 2 > Device Time > ...